ANIMALS

Richard Weller

Richard J. Weller is professor and chair of landscape architecture and co-executive director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania where he also holds the Meyerson Chair of Urbanism. He is author or editor of eight books and his design work has been exhibited in major galleries including the Guggenheim in New York, the MAXXI Gallery in Rome, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Weller’s recent research on global flashpoints between urbanism and biodiversity has been widely published, while the related design work was exhibited at the 2021 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

robably to survive being attacked, 600 million years ago some eukaryotic cells found it advantageous to band together and form larger assemblages. Epithelial cells then folded themselves into gastrula, essentially tubes with what we now refer to as a mouth at one end and an ass at the other. Around this fundamental morphology, evolution has sculpted an almost infinite array of fleshy forms. Of all these minor miracles we are but one, and although we know we are, as Darwin put it, “all netted together,” we still like to tell ourselves we are the exceptional ones.1 Unlike other animals we have words, numbers, foresight, free will, society, cities, and above all, gods.

Extraordinarily, we are also the first species in history to name an entire geological era after itself. But if we take the Anthropocene as an indictment rather than triumph, as I think we should, then our exceptionalism must now come under interrogation. As the Australian ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose renders it:

The legacies of Western machinism have manifested through repeated assertions of human exceptionalism – that man is the only animal to make tools, that man is the only animal with language, a sense of fairness, generosity, laughter, that man is the only mindful creature. On the one hand all of these claims to exceptionalism have all been thoroughly undermined. On the other hand the term Anthropocene reminds us that it is not yet time to jettison a sense of human exceptionalism. Instead, by foregrounding the exceptional damage that humans are causing, the Anthropocene shows us the need for radically reworked forms of attention to what marks the human species as different.2

A cornerstone of constructing human identity throughout history has been our alleged differences from animals. It is little wonder then that so much recent scholarship has returned to the question of the animal with renewed scrutiny of what it means to be human. Indeed, on the occasion of their extinction, animals are suddenly everywhere.

The ascendance of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) in the humanities and with it the deconstruction of human exceptionalism, coincides generally with the growth of environmentalism over the course of the latter half of the 20th century. The origin of HAS can be pinpointed to the 1975 publication of

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals.3

Three years later, zoologists William McGrew and Caroline Tutin concluded in the journal Man that chimpanzees are not just smart animals but, like humans, actively construct a culture.4 McGrew and Tutin’s conclusion has since been controversially reinforced by others such as primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh who claims that her research associate and coauthor, the bonobo “Kanzi,” spontaneously learnt words in much the same way a child does.5 It was also around this time that the stories of women such as Biruté Galdikas living with orangutans in Kalimantan, Jane Goodall living with chimpanzees in Tanzania, and Diane Fossey living (and dying) with gorillas in Rwanda entered popular culture.

Two years after McGrew and Tutin’s scientific publication, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari formulated their notion of “Becoming Animal” – inspiration perhaps for Jacques Derrida who left, on his death bed in 2004, an incomplete retort to Rene Descartes titled “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” In anthropology two important recent books—Beyond Nature and Culture 6 by Philippe Descola and How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology of the Nonhuman7 by Eduardo Kohn—both published in 2013, build upon the legacy of Claude Lévis-Strauss’s renowned investigations into animism. For Descola and Kohn animism is a way of circumventing, if not entirely reconciling, the problem of dualism in western thought. Whereas capitalism and its mechanistic underpinnings render the slaughter of millions of animals in so-called “concentrated animal feeding operations” invisible, animism sanctifies the highly selective and ritualistic killing of wild animals in relatively small numbers.

These scientific, philosophical, and anthropological reorientations have been consolidated in books such as Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel’s 1998 Animal Geographies 8 followed by Julie Urbanik’s 2012 Placing Animals. 9

Two years later, the Routledge Handbook of Animal Studies 10 was published and most recently, in 2018, Lori Gruen—a professor of ethics at Wesleyan College—published Critical Terms for Animal Studies. 11 Under the rubric of environmental humanities, HAS is also now being keyed into the general discourse of the Anthropocene where, for example, in books such as Art in